As President Donald Trump weighs a plan to move Madison Square Garden and make Penn Station great again, MTA Chair Janno Lieber’s previous clash with the arena’s owners over the future of the train hub offers a cautionary tale.
In 2022, Lieber commissioned a $74 million design to rebuild Penn. But the effort failed due to a lack of buy-in from MSG executives who didn’t want to give up real estate as part of the project.
Gothamist interviewed people familiar with the MTA’s Penn Station plan, offering new insight into the dynamics that make fixing the country’s busiest train station so complicated. The interviews revealed many were skeptical of the MTA’s pitch at the time, in part because the agency does not own Penn Station and had little leverage over the Dolans.
The total cost of the design — $74 million in taxpayer dollars — commissioned by the Lieber and the MTA has not previously been reported. MTA officials said their agency covered $30 million, with NJ Transit kicking in $23 million and Amtrak covering the remaining $21 million.
The MTA’s plan called for the Garden to give up private land so the transit agency could build a new entrance in the middle of the block between Seventh and Eighth avenues. The MTA also wanted MSG to pay for a portion of the construction costs.
MSG executives resisted entering into an agreement with the MTA, saying the agency’s plan was too thin on details.
“The plan that they have in terms of their vision is a concept piece,” Madison Square Garden Head of Government Affairs Richard Constable said during a 2023 City Planning Commission hearing over the arena's future. “It is not detailed. There’s no concrete engineering, no concrete mechanical, no concrete electrical, no concrete structural that we can look at and respond to.”
Lieber’s vision was abandoned last year when Trump returned to the White House and ordered the federal government to take over the reconstruction project.
Now, Lieber and the MTA are on the sidelines as the Trump administration fast-tracks what could be a transformative project. Trump is expected to select one of three proposals for the station’s redesign next month.
Transit insiders involved in the earlier Penn project were critical of Lieber’s effort to lead the rebuild, even though the station is owned by Amtrak, which is federally run. And several New Jersey officials thought the plan didn’t address their larger demand to expand Penn Station to the south by tearing down a city block in Midtown.
Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti, who was chief of staff for former New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy when Lieber was pitching his plan, said it “was such a pipe dream.”
The MTA's plan for Penn Station would have built a new light-filled entrance on an old taxiway owned by Madison Square Garden.
The MTA’s vision, which was put together by the engineering firm WSP and the architecture group FXCollaborative, aimed to tear up the station’s dizzying multifloor interior to create a single-level train hall. The design would create a new, wide entrance to the station on Eighth Avenue. And it would bring natural light into the dimly lit station by tearing up Madison Square Garden’s decommissioned taxiway.
Sean Fitzpatrick, the MTA construction department's deputy chief of staff, defended Lieber’s approach. He said in an interview that officials at the agency saw an opportunity for leverage to get what they needed: The Garden’s special operating permit was expiring in 2023.
“[We] ask the [City] Council not extend the permit, unless we come back with an agreement that paves the way for a modern Penn Station worthy of New York City,” MTA Construction Chief Jamie Torres-Springer said during a 2023 hearing on the arena’s permit extension.
But New Jersey officials were skeptical the plan would be well-received.
“It was a risky strategy based on the history of previous administration’s efforts to force the Dolans’ hand,” said former CEO of NJ Transit Kevin Corbett, who was running the agency up until 2025 and closely involved with the Penn Station plan. “The idea to force the Dolans to give up land … was not likely.”
The City Council, which had to vote on MSG’s permit, was in favor of a short, five-year permit extension amid frustration with the Dolans, who pay no property taxes on Madison Square Garden thanks to a decades-old exemption.
State Sen. Erik Bottcher, who at the time represented the area around Penn Station as part of the City Council, recalled being lobbied by the MTA and Gov. Kathy Hochul herself to extend the MSG permit by 10 years.
State officials said the longer agreement would help secure the Dolans' cooperation on the redesign of Penn Station.
But the MTA’s gambit fell on its face. Bottcher and his colleagues stuck with the plan to extend the Garden’s permit by just five years. The MTA lost its leverage.
"We never really heard from the MTA after that because the plan never seemed to go anywhere," Bottcher said.
MTA officials said they continued to advance its Penn redesign — but the agency never completed an environmental review for the project. Three months into his second term, the president announced Amtrak would take control of the reconstruction.
When the feds first took over the project, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement the MTA has a history of “inefficiency, waste and mismanagement” and that “a new approach is needed.”
Fitzpatrick, the MTA construction department’s chief of staff, said the agency hopes the federal government will use the agency’s $74 million plan as a blueprint for the winner of the design competition. Still, neither of the firms that produced the MTA’s plan are part of the finalists being considered by Trump to run the station’s rebuild.
But even now, there are hints that the long-standing rivalries between Amtrak, NJ Transit and the MTA persist. Fitzpatrick warned the feds not to encroach on a new LIRR passageway the MTA built as it pursues the Penn overhaul.
“We remain committed to using our leasehold rights to ensure any plan meets the needs of MTA customers, even after recent reports of President Trump personally interviewing potential contractors — a procurement process that seems odd and irregular,” Fitzpatrick wrote in a statement.
Trump has ordered Amtrak to begin construction on the Penn Station project by the end of 2027. One of the proposals he’s considering would move Madison Square Garden across the street — while another would purchase the arena’s Theater on Eighth Avenue to carve out a new entrance.
